Richard Hunt

Born in 1935 on the South Side of Chicago, Hunt’s journey as a sculptor began at the age of 15, working initially with clay in a studio he built in his bedroom, later moving to the basement of his father’s barbershop. In the early 1950s, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he encountered the work of Spanish sculptor Julio González in the exhibition ‘Sculpture of the Twentieth Century’. González’s forged, hammered and welded metal sculptures became one of the formative influences on the young artist. Inspired in part by González, Hunt transitioned away from soft materials and devoted himself solely to working with metal, teaching himself to solder, and later weld, discarded metal that he scavenged from local scrapyards in Chicago.

With a profound fascination for biological science and the natural world, Hunt meditated on trajectories of metamorphosis, from basic cell division to more complex evolutions. In the artist’s alloying of mechanical and organic vocabularies, Hunt’s abstract sensuosity acknowledges the inherent, unique possibilities of metal, unrivalled by any other sculptural materials be that clay, stone or wood.